WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, UCADI #178 I-7 - The anarchist communists, the Jewish and Palestinian questions I. - The (necessary) transformation: Israel guardian of the Arab Islamic world on behalf of the West (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 But let's look at the facts: with the end of World War II, colonial rule

entered a phase of definitive liquidation; in particular, the
protectorate held by Great Britain and France over countries inhabited
by Arab populations and those of the Middle East ceases, even if the
phenomenon is more general and also affects Asia, while for Africa we
will have to wait until the 1960s . However, the process is slow and
will end with difficulty. ---- The terrorist actions carried out by
Zionist terrorist organizations, the civil war situation and the growing
clashes between Arabs and Jewish migrants led England to announce the
renunciation of the mandate and so on 15 May 1947 the UN was
established, UNSCOP ( United Nations Special Committee on Palestine),
comprising 11 nations with the task of finding a solution to the issue.
The group concludes its work, noting that Arabs and Jews claim the same
territories and, considering that it is not possible to agree with one
or the other of the contenders, Resolution 181 is approved, which
recommended the division of the disputed territory between a State
Palestinian, one Jewish and a third area, which included Jerusalem,
administered directly by the UN. On November 29, 1947, the resolution
was voted on; 33 nations voted in favor, 13 against and 10 abstained. It
was also decided, to avoid possible reprisals on the part of the Arab
population, to gather all the areas where Jewish settlers were present
in significant numbers and thus constitute the future Jewish territory,
to which several uninhabited areas were added, mostly desert, in
anticipation of massive immigration from Europe, once the restrictions
imposed by the British government were abolished in 1939, and this
concerned 56% of the territory subject to the mandate.
At the time of the division of the territory, the ratio between the Arab
and Jewish populations of Palestine was one to three in favor of the
Arabs. But since the Jewish population owned a minimal part of the
territory - about 7%, compared to 50% of the Arab population, while the
remainder was in the hands of the British government of Palestine - the
Israeli fighting organizations tried to conquer as much territory as
possible for the own state.
Forcing them to flee with violence and terror, destroying many Arab
villages, they expelled the residents, while the Arab forces who aimed
to conquer the entire territory assigned to the Jewish ethnic group to -
in turn - expel them and block any future immigration, they lost the
game. Thus violence and mutual hatred developed, to the detriment of the
defenseless rural and urban Palestinian population of both ethnic
groups, creating an unbridgeable gap that continues today.
The official birth of the two states in Palestine was established by the
UN in 1948, but it never took place.
In fact, as soon as the British left the territory, the Arab League,
which had been formed in the meantime, which had not accepted the UN
resolution, unleashed a war of "liberation" against Israel. The
Israelis, violating the embargo imposed on the parties, purchased
weapons from Czechoslovakia and were thus able to turn the conflict in
their favor, reinforced in the meantime by many immigrants who had
escaped extermination and who had fought during the Second World War,
thus maturing considerable military experience. The result was that,
after the military defeat of the Arab armies and the ceasefire with the
individual states, signed in 1949, the only state, the Israeli one, was
actually established in Palestine, capable of defending its borders
provisionally constituted by the so-called green line that traced the
positions reached on the battlefield.
The Palestinian Arab population was hit hard by the massacres and
destruction carried out first by the Zionist militias and then by the
Israeli army, so much so that there was an exodus of the Palestinian
population from many villages towards neighboring states where exchanges
of refugees were created which gave rise to to the Palestinian diaspora,
given that at the end of the war, the Israeli state prevented the
displaced Palestinians from returning, while Jewish immigration was
encouraged, expropriating their lands and declaring them property of the
state.
Thus what the Palestinians call the nakba ("catastrophe" in Arabic) took
place: only 150,000 Palestinians remained in the territory controlled by
Israel, while around 750,000 fled and found refuge in the West Bank
(280,000), in the Gaza Strip (200,000), in Jordan (70,000), Lebanon
(97,000), Syria (75,000) and Iraq (4,000).
The Palestinian diaspora is thus made definitive, which will lead them
to be unwanted and unwelcome guests in the Arab states, to constitute
the majority of immigrant workers in the Gulf countries and used for
their higher level of education, to be part of the active proletariat in
many countries which in those years were moving towards future
development with the growth of oil and gas extraction and the birth of
construction activity.
In this period of time - after the withdrawal of the English - the
position of dominant power in these areas was assumed by the United
States, which, taking over from the former colonial powers, assumed
control of the oil extracting and producing countries. In the new
balance of power, Israel offered itself and became a sub-agent for the
United States area and in this role it was equipped, armed and
supported, financially and politically by American Jewish circles where
many Jews who escaped persecution and the Holocaust had found refuge .
The rapprochement between the Western colonial powers was gradual and
progressive, while at the same time Russia, for geopolitical reasons and
involved in the "cold war", distanced itself politically from Israel and
became the main supplier of armaments to the Arab countries.
On 26 July 1956, Gamal ?Abd al-Naser nationalized the Anglo-French-owned
Suez Canal Company: France and the United Kingdom intervened militarily
to protect their economic and strategic interests. Israel takes
advantage of the situation and enters the war alongside the two Western
powers, declaring that it feels threatened by the inter-Arab military
alliance, by Egypt with Syria and Jordan and by the ban on its ships
from crossing the Suez Canal.
France and the United Kingdom had to renounce the conflict due to the
threat of both Soviet and American intervention, but the Israeli army,
led by Moshe Dayan, managed to conquer Sinai which it returned to Egypt
only after the intermediation of the UN. France and England interrupt
their intervention and maritime circulation on the canal is restored,
but it is an armed truce, because the border between the two countries
is guarded by a UN interposition force which will be withdrawn on 21 May
67, at the approach of a new war, which takes the name of the six-day
war on 5 June 1967, preceded by a preventive attack by the Israeli air
forces which destroy on the ground almost all of the air forces of
Egypt, Syria and Jordan which are consequently without air cover, in a
few days, the armored and ground forces of the Arab countries were
defeated and Israel occupied the Sinai peninsula and the Gaza Strip,
which until then had remained under Egyptian military administration,
incorporated the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, taking it away
from the Jordanian administration and annexing the Golan Heights, taking
them away from Syria. While the Sinai is returned to Egypt following the
Camp David agreements, the occupied Syro-Palestinian territories remain
under Israeli jurisdiction, with respect to which Israel begins a
colonization policy, garrisoning the territory in an increasingly
massive manner, with the prospect of annexing it and thus canceling any
possibility of the creation of the Palestinian state according to the UN
resolutions.
The "dirty work" is carried out by armed settlers, many of whom are
close to the positions of the Israeli nationalist right, including the
Gush Emunim (Common People) movement, who drive out the Arab
populations, taking away their land and creating settlements. which are
both civil and military, given that the settlers provide self-defense
and increase their presence. Faced with this situation, the United
Nations was forced to intervene and solution 242 of 11.22.1967 was
approved which, envisaging the withdrawal of Israel from the occupied
territories, offered in exchange the recognition of the Jewish State by
the neighboring Arab States, starting the policy of "peace in exchange
for territories" that has characterized the Palestinian question.
Faced with Israel's choice not to apply resolution 242, the PLO
Organization for the Liberation of Palestine was born, a secular
organisation, which aimed to defend and promote the Palestinian cause
through guerrilla warfare against Israel, also resorting in an initial
phase to terrorist actions to then gradually transform into a
predominantly political movement.
Meanwhile, the war activities do not cease, proof of which is that the
"low intensity" state of war continues with military actions in Lebanon
and then in 1969 against Egypt, in 1970 towards Jordan. In that period
the most active guerrilla organization on the Palestinian side was the
National Front for Palestinian Liberation (FLP), which had established
its operational bases in those countries.
In 1973 the war exploded on the entire front along the borders of Israel
(fourth war), known as the Yom Kippur war; it is the armies of Egypt and
Syria that surprise attack Israel which, despite losing control of the
Suez Canal, manages to organize a counter-offensive of its armored units
which cross the Suez Canal and besiege the Egyptian III Army Corps,
armed with modern weapons supplied by the USSR. The UN "blue helmets"
must intervene to separate the belligerents: a new political phase
opens, Egypt and Jordan recognize the State of Israel and in 1974 the
PLO is admitted as an "observer" to the Assembly of UN as representative
of the Palestinian people.
In 1978, Israel invaded southern Lebanon and a UN mission with
interposition tasks, UNIFIL, was established in the buffer zone between
the two countries and is still present there today. The following year
the Camp David agreements led to the signing of peace with Egypt which
obtained - as mentioned - the restitution of Sinai and recognized the
State of Israel. In response, the Arab League suspended Egypt from
participating in the organization. Strengthened by this agreement, in
1980, Israel unilaterally annexed East Jerusalem and the unified city
was proclaimed the sole capital of the Jewish State; the following year
it annexed the Golan Heights. The response of the Islamic extremism of
the Muslim Brotherhood which has grown in Egypt in the meantime is the
murder of Anwar al-Sadat.
Israel's "attention" turns towards Lebanon; in 1982 the "Peace in
Galilee" operation was launched, which involved the creation of an area
free of Palestinian settlements around the northern Israeli borders,
with the aim of the definitive destruction of the PLO. Israel invades
Lebanon and Christian Phalangist troops, allies of Israel, are used,
entering the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila, killing around
3,500 people, with the tacit consent of the Israeli army which is
besieging the refugee camps. The Palestinian presence is inconvenient
and unwelcome to all states because it destabilizes the government of
the territory and effectively creates an antagonistic, potentially
revolutionary area of power, also from the point of view of class
relations, considering that the PLO is a movement of socialist.
The massacre of Palestinians is large and provokes protests from
international and internal public opinion in Israel: after an
investigation by the Supreme Court of Israel Ariel Sharon, Minister of
War, the Israeli Chief of Staff and the Israeli military manager of the
operations in Lebanon they resign. However, a systematic work of
removing the Arabs from their lands in the West Bank begins, Israel
acquires full control of the management of the region's water resources,
the Israeli army begins a systematic land reclamation operation,
destroying the homes of the Arabs, believed hostile, also with the aim
of facilitating the colonization of the territories and the acquisition
of their lands by settlers belonging to fundamentalist religious
movements. The objective is strategic: to make the birth of two states
impossible. In order to cope with the growth of the presence of Israeli
settlers in the West Bank, calculable in the order of 70,000, compared
to 2,000 settlers in Gaza, the PLO changes its strategy and attempts to
fight the Israeli occupation of the Occupied Territories to through
strikes and civil disobedience, as well as resorting to fighting tools
such as throwing stones at the occupying army, causing a great
impression in the Western world: the first Intifada ("shiver, shock,
fight", in Arabic) is called .
Continuing to resort to increasingly less radical forms of struggle, the
Palestinian National Council, meeting in Algiers, proclaimed the virtual
independence of the State of Palestine, accepting and citing UN
resolutions 181 and 242, and this after King Hussein of Jordan had
renounced to any claim on the West Bank; thus the territory of the new
state was precisely the West Bank and Gaza. By mid-1989, over 90 states
recognized Palestine as a state.
The extremist groups of traditionalist and religious Islamic origin who
did not recognize themselves in the PLO organized themselves in turn,
identifying the Hamas movement as a point of reference, linked to the
Muslim Brotherhood movement, born in Gaza in 1987, adopting as a method
of struggle the terrorism.
In 1992, the Jewish settlers who numbered 97,000 in the occupied
territories in the West Bank, 3,600 in Gaza, 14,000 in the Golan Heights
and 129,000 in East Jerusalem, already made the prospect of establishing
an exclusive Palestinian settlement on those territories less and less
possible. What happened sent an extremely clear message to the
Palestinian populations about their future and paved the way for the
growth of Hamas which presented itself as the only organization capable
of claiming a homeland for the Palestinians, continuing to deny the
right of the Israeli state to exist.
The collapse of the USSR which had historically supported the
Palestinian cause, while at the same time maintaining close ties with
the Jewish State due to the Russian origins of an insignificant part of
its population, led the PLO to enter into peace negotiations which
resulted in the agreements of Oslo, signed in Washington on 13 September
1993 by Yassir Arafat and Isaac Rabin: Israel would withdraw from the
Gaza Strip and the Jericho area in the West Bank and leave them to be
administered by a Palestinian self-governing authority for five years,
the Palestinian National Authority (PNA).
In 1995 the West Bank was divided into Zone A, comprising 18% of the
West Bank territory, including most of the Palestinian cities and
population, under Palestinian control; zone B, comprising 22% of the
territory, placed under Palestinian civil and Israeli military control;
and zone C, the only territorially contiguous one, comprising 60% of the
territory and all Israeli settlements, under Israeli control.
The project of progressive expansion in the Jewish state risked being
interrupted and it was for this reason that a member of the extreme
Israeli religious right, against the peace process, killed Rabin,
Israeli prime minister, one of the architects of the agreement, on 4
November 1995. .
In the elections of the following year, the Likud chaired by Netanyahu
won the elections and from then on began the era of parallel growth of
settlements of Jewish extremists in the West Bank, pendant to which was
the growth of Hamas in Gaza, which culminated with its electoral victory
of 2006, when the possibilities and hopes of creating a Palestinian
state have now evaporated. Netanyahu resumes encouraging settler
settlements in the West Bank.
Numerous episodes of violence contributed to strengthening the growth of
Hamas in the 1990s, such as the Hebron massacre in 1994 when an Israeli
Jew killed 29 Muslim Palestinians in a mosque, the repeated Palestinian
suicide attacks, claimed above all by Hamas: the bloodiest in Tel Aviv
in 1994 (22 deaths), near Natanya in 1995 (21 deaths), and in Ashkelon,
Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv between February 25 and March 4, 1996 (59 deaths
overall).
The victory in the 1999 elections of the Labor Party's Ehud Barak marked
a setback in the implementation of Netanyahu's strategy against the
birth of two states for the two peoples. Barak, in September 1999,
signed a new agreement to establish Israel's definitive borders and
decide the status of Jerusalem within a year. In 2000 he offered Arafat
a Palestinian state on 90% of the West Bank and the return of
Palestinian refugees to the Palestinian state, but not to Israel: his
proposals were not accepted by Arafat and the negotiations failed.
Despite this, in September 2005, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
completed a plan, announced in 2003, for the unilateral withdrawal of
Israeli soldiers and settlers from the Gaza Strip, handed over to the
PA, but Israel retained control of the borders and space plane, making
Gaza an enclave that depends on the Jewish state for supplies of
electricity, fuel, water and food.

https://www.ucadi.org/2023/11/05/i-comunisti-anarchici-la-questione-ebraica-e-quella-palestinese/
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